Coffee table books

The sun is merely a medium-size ball of gas and only one of 100 billion or so stars in the universe. Yet without it, life on Earth would not exist.

In "Sun" (Abrams, $19.95), Steele Hill and Michael Carlowicz offer in text and photos a look at the sun's intricate relationship with the Earth in both scientific and mythical terms.

The sun, they say, is the only star that can be studied up close - after all, it's only 93 million miles away - and the one star that affects our daily lives.

Hill, a photo researcher and authority on solar images, has selected photos of the sun made by conventional photographers as well as those from observatories and satellites. The photos are arranged according to our view of the sun - images from the ground, then from the fringes of Earth's atmosphere, from the edge of space and finally at the sun's surface.

The text provides facts and recent discoveries about the sun, and explains solar phenomena that we can see (rainbows, auroras, eclipses) as well as those invisible to the naked eye.

Images show the sun twinkling - remember, it is a star - from the Tokyo sky through the branches of a cherry blossom. Speaking of fruit, the sun looks like a huge, rough-skinned orange in an image of the surface made by measuring sound waves emanating from within the sun.

The first-known photo of the sun is here, a daguerreotype made in 1845 in France, as well as a series of time-lapse photos that show the progression of a huge sunspot group across the surface, which produced one of the most intense magnetic storms in Earth's history in March 1989.

And what could an aerial view of the Earth have to do with the sun? One such view shows the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, an arrangement of stones in a wagon-wheel design on the ground in Wyoming. It was constructed about 800 years ago by the Plains Indians, and is thought to have bean used to plot the sun's ascent and descent on the solstices.

Art depicts Northeastern summers

"Painting Summer in New England" (Yale University Press, $39.95), by Trevor Fairbrother, shows how Edward Hopper, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer and other American artists have captured the many aspects of a New England summer.

Its 97 color reproductions of paintings from the 19th century to the 21st take viewers to farms and fields and cities and coastlines, and depict the region's social and cultural life.

The works are divided by theme, including "quiet retreats," "sea and shore," "coastal light," "the farm" and "streets and gathering places."

Each section has a brief introductory essay, but this book is mostly about the paintings - which eloquently speak for themselves.

Four young women in long white dresses and hats enjoy the rocky coast in "Summer," Frank W. Benson's 1909 oil on canvas. Another small group, this one a family, enjoys the sweet outdoors under tall trees near their modest white house in Leon Kroll's 1916 oil on canvas, "Summer Days, Camden, Maine, The Bellows Family."

Plump sea gulls, perched on rocks and gliding aloft, are only part of the busy scene in "The Harbor at Herring Gut," N.C. Wyeth's 1925 oil on canvas, with sailboats and rowboats plying the harbor and clusters of small houses and trees lining the shore.

Andrew Wyeth uses a rooftop, partly seen, as the vantage point for a view of the uninhabited beach in "Northern Point," his 1950 egg tempera on gesso panel.

The view is from the tracks as people gather to board the bright red streetcar while puffy white clouds float upon a too-blue sky in "Gloucester Trolley," John Sloan's 1917 oil on canvas.

And no one is in sight - not even in the glass-walled phone booth - in "Path to the Lake," Scott Prior's 2003 oil on linen low-light depiction of the desolate lake, its path and the flowering shrub alongside it.

"Painting Summer in New England" accompanies an exhibit on show at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., through Sept. 4.